Research into Recording Ambient Sounds and Dialouge

Recording Ambient Sound

In film, ambient sound (also known as atmosphere, or background noise) consists of the sounds of a given location or space. It is the opposite of silence.
Every location has distinct and subtle sounds created by its environment, these sound sources mainly include wind, distant traffic, aircraft machinery, wildlife, background music, rain, rustling leaves etc. Basically ambient sound is any sound in the background of a setting that sets the scene. This is very important, as it has the power to provide more of an interesting location through sound.

This is a picture one of the shots in my edit of 'Duke Goes
To College' in which ambient sound occurs.

An example of use of ambient sound, is in my film 'Duke Goes To College', where at the beginning of the sequence, you see Duke walking to the front of the college building. There are many ambient sounds used in this sequence which include: Birds tweeting, the sound of soft wind, and cars passing.






Hard cuts of ambient sound are not preferred; when introducing a new scene or when jumping between two setting, it is ideal to try to introduce the new setting as best as possible. For example in 'The Hunger Games: Catching Fire', there will be many occasions where the setting will jump from the Capitol to the jungle, and before the jungle is shown, you will already be able to hear the ambient sound of flies and bugs, and the swaying of leaves; this really helps the audience to gradually get a feel of the new setting.

When recording ambient sound, you can do one of two things; you can either take ambient sounds from an existing sound library, or go out and record you own ambient recordings; the latter of which is the preferred option, as you can suit the sound specifically to your film.

Jeremy Peirson, the sound
designer for 'The Hunger
Games: Catching Fire'

In 'the Hunger Games: Catching Fire', the sound editor Jeremy Peirson went to Maui and recorded his own ambient sounds for the jungle scenes in the film. These included sounds of the ocean, trees and leaves swaying and the wild life


When compiling the ambient sounds together for 'The Hunger Games: Catching Fire',  the sound team used software called 'Atmos'. This software was used in the fog sequence, the baboon sequence and the Jabberjay sequence to ultimately create the desired feelings of ambience to the audience.

Recording Dialogue

The dialogue recorded on location, which in most cases is the projects only source of dialogue in post-production, is not always recorded with correct technique, which results in poor audio quality.

Many things must be accounted for when recording dialogue on location; bear in mind what microphone you are using, and consider the possibility that other background noises may interfere with the actors dialogue. Try to use a microphone that is ultra-directional for external locations; these microphones can be aimed at a sound source and will only pick up the required sound. The more directional the microphone, the better it will be at picking up sounds from its front end, and the higher the signal-to-noise ratio will be. Using directional microphones may help to record dialogue easier.

Boom microphone

In order to get the best quality and volume of dialogue possible, you must aim to place the microphone as close to the actor as possible; this can be achieved using a boom pole, to reach angles you may not be able to reach normally, or you could use wireless microphones, hidden in the actors costume.

Having the microphone closest to the actor will ensure audio focus on their dialogue.

Problems may occur in post-prodution of your film; one frequent big problem to do with dialogue is that sometime, the dialogue recordings won't be good enough quality, or will have ambient sound in the background. A good way to solve this problem is by means of 'looping' or ADR (Automatic Dialogue Replacement). This is hen you call in your actors to a sound studio, and have them dub over the footage, so they are effectively lip-syncing themselves. This gives you fresh audio that doesn't have to be recorded on location. You can easily hide ADR by ensuring there is ambient sound added to the clip.

Clint Eastwood as 'the man with no name' in
'the Good the Bad and the Ugly.

You see this in a lot in foreign films, where the script or language of the dialogue has been changed in post production; a good example of this in in the Clint Eastwood film 'the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly'. There are many instances in which you can clearly see that dialogue has been dubbed over the actors in post-production. This would have been due to on location dialogue problems, or changes in the script in post-production.

This video explains the Sound Design process that was used in Post-Production
of 'The Hunger Games: Catching Fire